by L. T. Vargus
“Exactly. He hasn’t touched base with the liaison in the Resident Agency out there in three days, so we’re in the dark.”
That was disappointing. This was starting to sound a little more like a babysitting mission and lot less like her profiling dream job.
“And look, I hope you don’t think I’m only sending you out to the boonies to play nanny to some pain-in-the-ass old timer.”
“I didn’t think that.” She hoped he couldn’t hear the smile in her voice. He knew her too well.
“The truth is, I’m just as interested in hearing your take, and I suspect the local law enforcement would feel the same. You and I both know that you’re the best profiler in CNU. You were spot-on with that active shooter in Phoenix. You saved lives.”
She frowned and said, “He turned the gun on himself. I didn’t do anything.”
“What are you talking about? That was in your profile, that he’d take himself out. So we sat. Who knows what would have happened if we’d sent HRT in right away? He might have killed one of our guys. Might have killed another hostage,” Cal said. “Don’t get humble on me, Darger. It doesn’t suit you.”
There was a brief pause.
“Or are you trying to tell me you don’t want this assignment?”
“No. I want it,” she said.
“Good. Then have your butt on a plane to Columbus tomorrow morning. I’ll get a copy of the files ready for you before you head out.”
Darger was scribbling instructions for herself on a scrap of paper while Cal continued to talk.
“The way I see it, we’re killing two birds with one stone. We’re kept in the loop, and you get your foot in the door with BAU. I know the weirdo stuff is kind of your thing.”
“The weirdo stuff. Nice.”
Cal chuckled. “You know what I mean. What I’m trying to say is, I’ve gotten the impression that there are people that would love for him to be out of the Behavioral Analysis Unit. All the talent in the world is worthless if you won’t be part of the team.”
“And he doesn’t get reprimanded for… I don’t know, not playing well with others?”
“Yes and no. He has friends higher up the chain, and like you said, cronyism is alive and well in the FBI. He’s totally protected. For now.”
Personally Darger wasn’t interested in FBI politics. Actually, it was more than that. She detested it. But she kept her mouth shut and let Cal go on.
“Anyway, it was held back from the press, but there’s a witness. A failed abduction. The girl — Peters is her name, I think — gave a full account. With your experience counseling victims and witnesses, I figure who better to talk to her? I’d start there and see what you come up with.”
The conversation ended, and Darger dabbed her finger at the touchscreen to hang up. She went back to cleaning her weapon, her lips curling at the corners but not quite smiling. The new assignment was good news, she thought, but she wasn’t going to get excited about a one-off case like this.
Of course, the rapid beating of her heart said otherwise.
Chapter 2
By the time she arrived in Athens, she’d gone over the files. Cal had them waiting for her at the front desk of his new office, along with a ticket to Columbus departing the next morning and a voucher for her rental car. She’d spent that evening acquainting herself with the crimes over a large cheese pizza and garlic bread from Giovanni’s.
Three girls, all from the Athens and Hocking county areas, kidnapped, murdered, dismembered, and dumped in public places.
The first victim, Cristal Munroe, was found in an empty lot next to a roller rink, her body wrapped in black plastic garbage bags. Cristal was from the poor side of town. She shared a trailer with two other girls. The three of them had all worked at the same strip club, a seedy joint that was well known to have girls who would do more than just take off their clothes. Despite the fact that Cristal had recently left her job at the club to enroll in classes at the local community college, police still initially suspected her murder was the by-product of a trick gone wrong.
It wasn’t until a second girl went missing that the media started speculating about a serial killer. Local law enforcement had no interest in the sensationalist murmurs from the press and denied any connection between the two girls. But when Katie Seidel’s body was discovered a few days later, mutilated in a strikingly similar fashion to Cristal Munroe, they were forced to reconsider the serial killer angle.
Less than a month later, a third girl named Sierra Peters was abducted. She was able to fight off her attacker and escape. Police suspected the man that tried to abduct her was the same man that had killed Cristal and Katie.
Then, nearly a week ago, the body of Fiona Worthington was found — also in trash bags — this time in the dumpster of a Burger King.
Fiona was a 27-year-old graduate student at Ohio University in Athens. Her parents lived nearby, her father being an English professor at the university. She was everything the first three girls were not — upper middle class, photogenic, and well-educated. The kind of victim the media always had a hard-on for.
Indeed, the third body started a media shitstorm, and that was when the local authorities called in the FBI.
The tires bumped over a railroad crossing, and Deputy Donaldson aimed a finger at a rectangular brick building. The structure looked dark, half the windows were broken, and the sign out front read “B I AM HOE ACE CO.”
“That there is the former Brigham Shoelace factory. It was a major blow to the local economy when that place closed down. Now, I know what you’re thinkin’. Who’d imagine you’d need a whole factory just to make shoelaces? Well, you’d be surprised. That place was the backbone of this town.”
Darger grunted agreement. They passed another crumbling brick carcass, and the Deputy nodded toward it.
“Used to manufacture washing machines over there. They ship these jobs off to China or wherever, and then send us back this crap that lasts two years before it falls apart, so we constantly have to go buy new crap to replace it.”
“Right.”
“My parents gave me a toaster oven as a graduation gift when I went off to college. Lasted me 26 years before I decided it was lookin’ a little hairy. Figured I’d get something that looked of this century. So I go out to Wal-Mart and get me a slick-looking Black and Decker, same exact brand I had before, mind you. Piece of crap burns out in eight months. And the real kicker? I would have gone back to the old one, but I already donated it to the Sally Am. I even went around lookin’ for it. No dice.“
Darger clenched her jaw, felt the muscles ripple. She wanted more than anything to be alone with the file and the crime scenes and her thoughts. She didn’t need someone else’s rambling observations gunking up the works. But Donaldson was a talker. She knew that the second he waddled out of his office to shake her hand and went off on a tirade about the “ongoing embarrassment that is the Bengals secondary.”
What she was most worried about was that they’d get to the crime scene, and he’d really go off. Spewing out his own pet theories. That was the last thing she wanted.
In her opinion, there was more than one way to contaminate the crime scene, and one of them was with talk.
She’d seen it plenty of times. Cops are on the scene. Someone says, “looks like the husband did it.” And based on the numbers, maybe it’s not a bad guess for a shot-in-the-dark. But that kind of guesswork often led to tunnel vision, no matter anyone’s best intentions. Suddenly people were looking specifically for evidence that backs up the narrative they’ve already accepted, excluding anything that didn’t fit.
As a rule, agents working on profiles made an effort to maintain the purity of their own assessments. Darger wanted to get a feel for things without outside opinions. She had explicitly skipped over anything in the file that leaned toward analysis. She wanted only the facts. It was also one of the reasons she wanted to visit the crime scenes before meeting with Agent Loshak.
She wondered,
again, if she was overstepping. No one had specifically told her to work up a profile, and based on all she’d heard, she didn’t figure Loshak would be too keen on the idea.
A pothole in the road rattled Darger out of her thoughts. She realized the Deputy had stopped the running commentary somewhere a few miles back. She had a sense that her silence was becoming awkward. She forced herself to say something.
“How long have you been with the Sheriff’s Department?”
“Coming up on a quarter-century next year. And I don’t mind telling you I’ve never seen anything like this. We usually have a few cases of arson every year, and then there are the sexual assaults, the drug-related crimes, the domestic disturbances, but we’ve only had ten murders in-county in the last decade or so. Until now, of course.”
“Wow,” Darger said. “I guess that’s why you called us in.”
“Absolutely. If it were up to me, I’d hand the whole thing off to the FBI. This is… well, it’s not what I imagined when I signed up for the force.”
Donaldson took his eyes off the road to glance at her.
“I’m assuming you’ve read the book?” he said.
“The book?”
“The one Agent Loshak wrote? Killer Instincts?”
“Oh, right. Of course.”
He shook his head.
“I got it out from the library after I heard it was him who was comin’ down to help out. Figured it wouldn’t hurt to do my homework, so to speak. But I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t get through it.”
He suddenly looked more serious.
“No offense.”
One of Darger’s eyebrows quirked upward.
“None taken.”
“It wasn’t the writing, mind you, but the content. Crap gives me nightmares. I can’t imagine gettin’ in the heads of these sickos. I mean… I don’t want to know.”
Darger didn’t know what to say to that.
“What’d you think of it?” Donaldson said.
“Of Loshak’s book?”
The deputy bobbed his head once.
“He kind of wrote the textbooks for the field, so… I’ve learned a lot from him even though we’ve never met.”
“Never met? How is that possible?”
“We’re in different units,” she said, “and Agent Loshak mostly works alone from what I hear.”
“Oh, I must have been way off. I thought you two were related.”
“What gave you that idea?”
“When I dropped off the files and photos at his motel room, I saw that he had a picture up on the night stand. It was a girl who looked quite a bit like you. I thought so, anyhow. Younger, of course, but I just thought…”
Darger thought about it a second before she remembered hearing the news about Loshak’s family.
“He had a daughter who passed last year. Cancer.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. I mentioned the photograph, even, and he didn’t say anything. I didn’t think much of it at the time. Me puttin’ my foot in my mouth is nothing new, I guess.”
The turn signal ticked as they waited to make a left turn. Looking down the hill, Darger could see the circular Burger King sign rising above the roofs of the businesses below. The marquee sported a message offering Buy One Get One Original Chickens.
It wasn’t until they wheeled into the parking lot that she realized Donaldson hadn’t actually talked about the case at all.
Chapter 3
Deputy Donaldson slid the gearshift into Park but left the car idling. Darger moved to exit the vehicle, but she stopped when she noticed that Donaldson wasn’t stirring.
“You coming?”
“I’ll, uh, sit this one out, if you don’t mind.”
“Alright,” she said, not minding at all.
“To be completely honest with you, I have a tough time with all of the… the blood and all.”
He gave a sort of sheepish twitch of his shoulders.
“I’m not proud.”
She didn’t know what to say, so she gave him a curt nod and climbed out of the cruiser.
Rays of sunlight slanted down through the trees above. She took a breath, the charred smell of flame-broiled burgers filling her nostrils. Pretty gross. Something about the idea of meat and murder in close proximity to one another made her a little queasy.
Approaching the dumpsters, she noted the yellow crime scene tape fluttering in the breeze. Something about the tape’s flapping seemed serpentine to her.
She paused just shy of the dumpster itself. This was it. This was where a Burger King employee lived out a nightmare. Spilling a garbage bag of human remains onto the asphalt, blood and grease oozing in all directions. Darger closed her eyes and saw the crime scene photos in her head. Deep gouges pocked the torso, ranging from small slits showing red to gaping pits trailing off into the black of shadows. Fourteen stab wounds, if she remembered the autopsy findings correctly.
The angry slash across the neck went a step beyond the worst of the stab wounds, so deep it had nearly taken the head clean off. Had decapitation been his intent? She paged through the files until she reached the medical examiner’s report. They found marks indicative of sawing in addition to the slash across the neck that served as the fatal wound. Maybe.
Darger skirted around the perimeter of the dump site, taking in the crime scene from different angles. Traffic whooshed by, an almost constant source of background noise. But it wasn’t static. It undulated, like waves on a beach. Certainly not an isolated location. He picked it for a reason.
The faux shutter sound blipped out of her phone as she snapped photos from various vantage points. It was somewhat unusual for profilers to actually visit the crime scenes in person. Usually, they studied the case file, spit out a profile and move on. But she knew Loshak did it this way, and she wanted to do the same. There were things you could miss in police photographs. The atmosphere of a place.
That was the reason Darger also took her own set of pictures. She wanted visual reminders to bring back the feeling of actually being there. Personal documents. She wanted to be able to remember how busy the street was, what other businesses were in view, where the killer might have stopped or parked his car during the dump.
The dumpster of a fast food joint. The grease dumpster, she reminded herself. Might have been intentional. He might have thought the oil would further complicate things forensically. Or it could have been an accident. If he were in a rush, he may have mistaken it for a regular trash dumpster. He would have heard the splash of the first bag. But by that time, he’d already committed.
She moved closer to the dumpster now, imagining the course he would have taken driving into the lot. Parking. Getting out of the car. Opening the trunk.
There were dark oil spots on the concrete, and when she flipped open the file to the photos taken when the scene was fresh, she confirmed that these were indeed the places where the bags had rested upon being removed from the dumpster.
Emanating from the dark splotches were streams and smears. They were dry now, of course, but still unmistakably blood.
In the photos, the stains were wet. Glistening against the pavement. Pools of it, drying sticky and gelatinous. Gummy.
As quickly as the shutter on a camera snapping open and shut, a different image of blood on concrete flashed in her mind. And then the metallic scent of it, almost more a feeling in her nose than a true smell. Her breath caught in her throat.
The world blurred for a moment, pulse throbbing in her ears. She tasted stomach acid at the back of her tongue.
She crouched in front of the smears on the pavement and closed her eyes. From where the deputy sat in his car, it would appear she was getting a closer look. But the truth was, she was a bit concerned she might faint.
Darger wouldn’t let it happen. She took a long, deep breath, and her mind flicked into an exercise to center herself.
My name is Violet Darger.
I was born on April 13th.
I am standing in the parkin
g lot of a Burger King.
Today is Friday.
It is sunny out, barely a cloud in the sky.
By the end, her breathing had slowed. Her pulse still thrummed in her chest, and her hands felt clammy, but she no longer felt like she was going to throw up or pass out, at least.
The exercise worked. It always did. For now, anyway.
Violet took out her phone again and snapped a few photos of the stains. Looking at them through the lens of the camera helped calm her a little more. She felt once-removed from the scene.
She flicked backward in the file. The first two dump sites were entirely out in the open. No attempt at concealment. Did the move to a dumpster suggest he was ashamed of this one? Maybe something went wrong, and he was trying to cover it up?
Darger scribbled these questions on her notepad, then paused to chew on a fingernail.
Based on the lack of rigor mortis and the state of decomposition, the medical examiner estimated the time of death to be around 48-72 hours before she was discovered. She’d been missing around 72 hours.
How long had she been in the oil? Violet squinted, trying to remember the interview notes with Teresa Riley, the Burger King manager. The one who had found the body. She flipped through the file and confirmed that Ms. Riley stated that oil is deposited into the dumpster once a day after the store closes. That would suggest that the body was dumped the night before it was discovered, sometime after 11 PM. Although there was the suggestion by Ms. Riley that the oil may not have been changed then. Violet ran her finger under the letters of the interview transcript as she read.
DET. LUCK: So the dumpster would have been opened by one of your staff last night around the same time?
REILY: Well now, I didn’t close last night. And sometimes the grease don’t get changed, you see? Not when I’m here, of course. I make sure those fryers are cleaned out every night. But no one really likes to do it, so I know sometimes they aren’t doing it. I know it. Because I come in the next day, and there’s a smell, you know? The oil gets a bad smell if you don’t-
